Testing

I’ll be testing the cooler on a Connect3D X1950 Pro card which has the stock cooler installed. The card will be running in a Lian Li PC-B20 case with the side graphics card 120mm fan removed as most people don’t have one.

The case is closed during testing and there is one front 120mm fan and one rear 80mm to provide case ventilation. The AM2 3800+ CPU is cooled by a Thermaltake Max Orb and the system is powered by an Enermax Liberty 400w.

The ambient was constantly at 19C throughout the testing.

The temperature was taken with the onboard thermal diode on the X1950, and monitored by ATI Tray Tools taking measurements every tenth of a second.

To load the card, RTHDRIBL was used at 1600x1200 with 16x multisampling which ran at 5fps which shows that the card was being fully used. The test phase ran for 30minutes after 30minutes of idling.

The stock heatsink and fan present on the X1950 Pro was set for automatic function where the fan speed changes depending on the temperature in order to keep noise levels down. I tested with automatic mode enabled which ran the fan at 40%, and then force the fan at 100% for the second test. At 40% is audible and even more so at 100%. Neither speed could be categorised as silent or quiet.

The results are shown as idle temperatures plus load difference.

The GX810 in operation is well nigh silent. It’s slightly louder than the GX700’s but it’s a LOT better than the stock cooler.

Speaking of better than the stock cooler; the results speak for themselves. It manages to get temperatures lower than the stock fan at full pelt in both idle and load scenarios, which is no mean feat.

Not only does it cool fantastically and lowers case noise, but it adds some extra lighting courtesy of the two red LED’s built into the fan. I thought that red wouldn’t really go with the whole cooling aspect, but it’s a nice change from the usual blue and looks nice and stylish.